Germany’s incoming interior minister has promised to ‘significantly’ speed up deportations of failed asylum seekers and to take a tough line against criminal migrants.
Horst Seehofer, of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative Bavarian sister party the CSU, also promised a broader ‘zero-tolerance’ law and order drive under their new coalition government to be launched Wednesday.
Seehofer was long the harshest critic within Merkel’s conservative bloc of her decision to open Germany’s borders to a mass influx of migrants since 2015.
Horst Seehofer (pictured), of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative Bavarian sister party the CSU, also promised a broader ‘zero-tolerance’ law and order drive under their new coalition government to be launched Wednesday
Germany’s mass migrant influx brought more than a million people to Europe’s biggest economy, about half of them from war-torn Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Pictured: Angela Merkel, who open the country’s borders
Most of those who came across the Balkans route passed through Seehofer’s southern state of Bavaria – at times more than 10,000 a day – sparking a strong backlash in the region.
In an interview with newspaper Bild am Sonntag, Seehofer said that as the new head of an expanded ministry of interior and homeland affairs, he was working on a ‘master plan for speedier asylum procedures and consistent deportations’.
Repatriations and deportations must be ‘raised significantly’, he said, vowing to especially ‘get tougher’ on those who break German law or are deemed a security threat.
‘We want to remain a country that is open to the world and liberal,’ Seehofer said. ‘But when it comes to protecting the citizens, we need a strong state. I will take care of that.’
Most of those who came across the Balkans route passed through Seehofer’s southern state of Bavaria – at times more than 10,000 a day – sparking a strong backlash in the region. Pictured: Migrants walking close to the Croatian-Slovenian border in October 2015
Migrants walk to a first registration point of the German federal police after they crossed the Austrian-German border in the small Bavarian village of Simbach in September 2015
Seehofer also said: ‘There has to be a consensus throughout Germany that we will no longer tolerate lawless zones.’
Germany’s mass migrant influx brought more than a million people to Europe’s biggest economy, about half of them from war-torn Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.
It sparked a backlash and bolstered the rise of the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which entered parliament last September with almost 13 percent of the vote.
Merkel’s fourth-term government, a coalition with the centre-left Social Democrats that is due to be sworn in this week, has vowed to keep the annual intake of new asylum seekers below 200,000.